


every me knows every you

by foreignconstellations



Category: Nowhere Boys (TV)
Genre: M/M, Multi, Reincarnation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-02-04
Updated: 2014-02-04
Packaged: 2018-01-11 03:54:38
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,592
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1168369
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/foreignconstellations/pseuds/foreignconstellations
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They all remember differently, but they have all met before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	every me knows every you

**Author's Note:**

> contains brief references to murder in the third part

**i.**

Felix is the only one that remembers their first life. He wakes up one morning, and just _knows_ , a new-old set of memories settling into place inside his head. He remembers dark forests and darker dungeons, sunlit glades and freezing stone walls. He remembers what it felt like to have real magic, power that extended out of him as an extension of his will. He remembers lighting a copse of trees on fire just by _wishing_ it.

He writes it all down. It seems, most of the time, like a story he made up – castles and dragons, knights and sorcerers. It’s hard to reconcile the Jake and Sam in his memory (where they wield swords and run to the rescue of the downtrodden and kiss Felix so sweetly), with the ones in his present (where they wield fists and harsh words and shove Felix into walls on their way past, because he is less than nothing to them).

He comes close to telling Oscar, once. One hot, sticky evening, when Oscar is unable to sleep, and asks Felix to tell him a story, like they’re little kids again (like Felix’s heart doesn’t break and break again when he looks at Oscar now, like Oscar can still _walk_ ). It comes spilling out of Felix’s mouth before he can think twice, a story of myth and magic, where every knight fights side by side with a sorcerer (“More efficient that way,” Felix says, and Oscar nods seriously). A story about two knight-and-sorcerer partnerships in particular, four boys who were the best of friends, who stood back to back on the battlefield and never let anything touch them, who loved each other so much not even death could keep them apart. But when he looks over at Oscar again, he’s fallen asleep.

Sometimes, Felix thinks it’s not memories at all, he’s just making it all up in his head. He passes Andy or Jake or Sam in the hallways and just doesn’t understand how the men he loved so dearly, once upon a time, have become what they have. But then they fall into a world where they never existed, and everything changes; he watches Jake stand up for Mike Parker, discusses the particulars of magic with Andy, leans into the supporting arm Sam throws around his waist. It’s all new and it’s wonderful but it’s also deeply familiar, and for the first time he looks into the eyes of the others and thinks that maybe, just maybe, they remember him too.

 

**ii.**

Jake remembers slowly, memories winding through his head in a steady trickle. It’s scares the hell out of him, at first – he’s got no context for the things that are suddenly in his head, memories of darkness and fear and another feeling he can’t name, a feeling that seems to big for him. For a long time, all he can remember is the sound of voices in the dark, the feeling of hands on his.

He gets a little older, starts learning about the First Fleet in school, and suddenly there are all manner of facts in his head. The come tumbling out of his mouth before he can even stop himself – his teacher looks at him, pleased but baffled, and asks where he learned that. Jake stutters out he doesn’t know. He isn’t used to knowing things, and it scares him. Eventually, he puts it together with the other memories (because these things he knows now, they’re not just _facts_ , they are _memories_ ), finally finds a context for the hands and the voices. It’s strange, but it feels _right_ – Jake is still young and his father hasn’t left yet. He has not learned to always expect the worst.

When he finally remembers their faces, he wishes he hadn’t. It’s much easier to be comforted by an idea, an ideal, by the vague hope that somewhere out there, there are others, looking for him. He looks at Sam and Felix and Andy and wants to recoil; they are not the kind of people he’d trust with what’s at the heart of him. Yet, at the same time, he remembers loving them so fiercely he could burn with it. He has no idea how to find his equilibrium. (He thinks Sam might know, sometimes. They’re friends easily – as easy as someone untouchable as Sam has friends, anyway – and there are times when Jake catches Sam watching him, like Jake’s a puzzle he’s trying to figure out. But there are other times when Sam looks at Jake and seems scared, and Jake can’t help but think of all the bad things that could possibly mean. So he pushes all his thoughts away.)

By the time they get lost, Jake’s well in the habit of shoving his unwanted memories away. But it’s hard, when Felix’s laugh sounds exactly the same, and he knows precisely how Sam’s fingers feel against his, and Andy looks at him with so much trust. He falls into looking out for them like he was born to do it, and it’s not just because of the memories (it’s because of how Sam demands attention from everyone around him, how Andy chatters about things Jake only half-understands, how Felix chews on his lip rings). For the first time, he considers telling them.

 

**iii.**

Sam has dreams that don’t feel like dreams. He’s not sure how to describe the difference, but it’s there and he knows it. When he’s younger, he just thinks they’re nightmares, but when he gets older he realises they’re something else. Something real.

Sam does not want his dreams to be real. In his dreams, he runs across rooftops and cobbled in the moonlight, chasing shadowy figures so scared he can practically smell it. In his dreams, he knows hundreds of different ways to kill someone, and he laughs while demonstrating them. In his dreams, he has bloody hands and a bloodier smile. He’s scared of the dreams (sometimes, they make him scared of himself), but he doesn’t tell anyone. He smiles and swaggers and pretends, because if he wishes for everything to be alright hard enough it will be.

It goes well enough, until the other boys appear in his dreams-that-aren’t-dreams. Boys he knows, that he passes in the hall or sits across from in class every day. He looks at them now and wonders if they have their own dreams, if they’re also wondering what they mean. If they, like him, are scared at their capacity to kill. Jake Riles nods at him in the hall and Sam does not know how to say that in his sleep last night, he watched Jake slit a man’s throat, and laughed.

He realises the dreams are memories about the same time he finds himself in a world where he doesn’t exist. He looks at his replacement and wonders if that’s something else he’s taken, if he has his own dreams, his own boys from another life. Sam doesn’t think so, and he takes a sick kind of comfort in it.

 

**iv.**

Andy remembers in flashes, like he’s looking at a photograph, or hearing a line from a song. It’s a slow, disjointed process, which is frustrating – if there’s one thing Andy hates, it’s not knowing things. And it’s not like he has any means to find out; he simply has to wait for the memories to come to him (not that he doesn’t try, reading all he can about how memory works, how to recall things long forgotten. The rules are probably a little different for past lives, though).

He looks in all the history books, but there’s no record of him, or any of the others. In any other situation, he’d doubt himself, rally for other explanations. Anything that would make more sense than him having memories of living as a pilot in World War II. But he just can’t – the truth of it is settled in his bones, he knows for a fact that it’s true, even if he has no explanation. But it irks at him, these memories and feelings he has no explanation for, so he pushes them aside, trains himself not to think about it.

Acknowledging the existence of magic is like opening a floodgate in his head. It almost all tumbles out of him, then, how he remembers them all, because surely they _must_ remember him too. He wants to ask them if they still remember how to fly their planes, how to handle rifles. If they remember what the sunset looked like from so far off the ground. But he doesn’t. It’s never the right time.

 

**v.**

It’s not until they finally get back home that they even talk about it.

(“There’s something I have to tell you,” says Felix. “About, when you asked me why I picked you all for the spell. You do have potential for magic, but there’s something else too.” He pauses (Sam’s breath catches, Andy’s eyes widen, Jake’s heart skips a beat).

“We’ve all met before.”)

It takes them a while to muddle through, sort out all their differing memories. They’re all scared, in different ways, of living and not living up to their past selves. Of how it’s going to affect them all, as they are now. Their retellings of their own individual memories are stilted; they’re all trying to find words for things they’ve so long kept locked away. They all know it’s going to take a while to work things out.

At the same time, it feels like coming home all over again.


End file.
